Highlights

Formal empirical analysis of the social impact of crises, policy adjustments and other economic events is typically underpinned by an ex- post analysis using nationally representative household survey data.

Social budget tracking and analysis tools monitor the extent of priority and protection given to public budget items and can influence government policies in favour of allocations to children and families.

Poverty and Social Impact Analyses, PSIAs, are aimed at facilitating an ex-ante understanding of the potential distributional impacts of a given policy reform. Child rights centered PSIAs, add a child focus to these impact assessments, as tools specifically designed to promote more child sensitive real-time policy making.

Empirical Analysis Using Micro-Level Datasets

Formal empirical analysis of the social impact of an economic event, be it a crisis or a policy adjustment, is typically underpinned by ex-post investigations, which use representative household survey data. These types of studies are often able to account for exacerbating conditions (e.g. existing poverty and domestic factors) and mitigating factors (e.g. social protection interventions), which then provide a clear sense of the net impact of the economic event being analysed on various population groups, including children, women and poor families.

The main challenge with using this approach, however, lies in the significant time lag (anywhere from 1 to 2 years) resulting from the delayed availability of survey data that reflect the impact of an economic event or policy change.

This section features key recent studies that use this analytical approach: